Page - 434 - in Biodiversity and Health in the Face of Climate Change

434 Two important requirements of health are recreation and food supply. Recreation is frequently mentioned in the two kinds of planning documents: Green spaces are recognised as recreational opportunities and thus their maintenance or improvement is generally seen as an important goal of planning in all of the ten analyzed docu- ments, even though they are more often and more intensively mentioned in GI strate- gies. Most of the investigated GI documents draw an explicit connection between healthier lifestyles and the improvement of areas for recreation. The investigated Local Plans/Core Strategies (with a few exceptions) do not draw this connection but rather look at recreational areas from a planning point of view (e.g. maintenance and development of a network of recreational routes that provide easy access to country- side areas ensuring that the need for recreational areas of all residents is met). Regarding food supply, half of the investigated documents  – three Core Strategies/ Local Plans and two GI Strategies  – promote ‘grow your own’ schemes. These include community food groups as well as individual growing plots and allotments. It should be noted that the health benefits of growing one’s own food are not only from healthy nutrition but also arise from the physical outdoor activity (and poten- tial social cohesion benefits) related to it. Van den Berg et  al.’s (2010) study of 120 allotment holders and 60 non-gardeners in the Netherlands found that allotment gardeners are more physically active; 84% of allotment gardeners met the national recommendations for physical activity, compared to 62% of non-gardeners. To sum up, as far as our selection of ten case studies allows, it can be said that the contribution of green spaces and elements to human health is already integrated into England’s planning approaches, but it is more explicit in the informal and vol- untary GI documents. Core Strategies/Local Plans refer to health issues in an implicit way by dealing with topics such as climate change adaptation and mitiga- tion, walking and cycling routes, recreation, or ‘grow your own’ schemes, without clearly mentioning the health effects of the respective aims and actions. Therefore, it can be assumed that the status quo in official planning documents is similar to Germany. Recently, Public Health England has issued guidance (2017) to try to link HIA to EIA, and to encourage public health teams to engage with the planning sys- tem in this regard. It recognises that, for major developments at least, the consider- ation of impacts needs to be multi-dimensional and consider health as well as the landscape and other environmental issues. 19.4 Ways to  Include Health Issues in  Planning Processes and  Documents Three options to promote human health in landscape planning have been identified by Rittel et  al. (2016). Whilst mainly referring to urban landscape planning in Germany, they could also be transferred and applied to other planning instruments or systems. The three options differ in methodological intensity and breadth of scope: S. Heiland et al.